Any Dwarf Fortress geeks here?

November 23rd, 2007, 19:13

I just started dabbling in Dwarf Fortress, and I'm hooked. It took me about one evening to figure out the extreme, very, total basics, and yesterday I got far enough to accidentally drown my dwarves in a horrible irrigation accident (it turns out that water runs downhill). I think I know what I did wrong so I can start over with more luck. Maybe.

I.e., once past the insanely irritating UI where sometimes - means up, sometimes u means up, and sometimes up arrow means up, I'm starting to have fun. Without the wiki, I wouldn't have a prayer, though.

So it appears. You guys don't know what you're missing. I'm totally hooked. Plus I take back everything I said about not learning anything from games — I've got the mineralogy links on Wikipedia open as I'm playing…

I have been playing occasionally since the last winter and got addicted again when that new version was released a while ago. Z-levels added lots of new depth to the game (no pun intended) but they have also been a source of minor annoyance to me when I have thought that I found a perfect starting location and then the ground elevation is completely wacky. I wouldnt mind the challenge brought by that so much if the caravan and immigrant spawn locations would be somehow predictable, but as far as I'm aware they arent. It's not so big issue now that the vagon speed was increased, but it would be nice to know from the beginning.

I'm still in the process of re-learning all the finer points of the game, and so far my new fortresses have been dismal failures for being boring and unimaginative (mostly as a result for playing it too safe) and I have ended up abandoning them for various reasons - best one so far because a crash lost me nearly five hours of progress, and I didnt feel like re-engraving my huge legendary dining hall and re-smelting a metric shitton of gold and steel again. (Seasonal autosave is enabled now, thank you very much.)

I think it's the time to start on a sinister glacier and face the true horrors that the game can throw at you. Aside from a titan that got shot by sieging goblins I havent had much of that yet.

Somehow I'm glad I don't need to deal with that kind of crap yet. I just managed to get my first magma workshop running, in a nice little corner of the map with magnetite-rich chalk, sand, trees, and a waterfall, with only the trees and sand a bit of a walk away. My seven dwarves seem reasonably happy despite the lack of creature comforts and somewhat monotonous diet of plump helmets and fish.

Next up: farming pig tails, cave wheat, and rock bushes. I hope I'll get some immigrants to give a hand too…

It's funny how quickly you get used to the ASCII graphics. (OK, I have played way more NetHack than is good for me so I guess I have a bit of a head start there.)

The UI, OTOH, could use a major overhaul — I'm still constantly hitting the wrong keys because I'm in the wrong context (e.g. trying to d[esignate] d[ig] when I'm still in the b[uild] menu because I didn't hit space the right number of times). The only trouble is that if they ever do it, I'll hate it because by then I will have learned this one.

@magerette: I did look up the screenshots right after posting. Big surprise, my dream looked nothing like the screenies. The game I dreamt of last night looked less like ASCII and more like Catacomb Apocalypse. But I'll still play Dwarf Fortress!

My plant fiber crops just failed and I have no more seed. That screwed up my plan for upgrading to cave wheat and quarry bushes — I need sacks to process them, and without fiber, I can't make cloth, without which I can't make sacks.

Luckily some elven traders showed up with literally a ton of cloth, so I bought their entire stock off them with some nice silver and platinum trinkets I've made. Now to make sacks so I can carry grain and leaves to be processed into nicer food. Yay!

You *do* know how geeked out that sounds…I wish you'd stop, because I know I can't play this game in the existing comparative states of its graphics and my eyeballs. Not to mention my questionable keyboard skills. That little paragraph reminded me strongly of my chinese cities in Emperor—never enough rice, fish, game meat and/or wheat to make Tasty Food without trading.

I decided to try it after the latest round of gushing over it at the Codex. I don't think I even managed to start a new game. It sounds good though and I'd love to devote the time to learn it. Now, if only I could find that time…